Word: mahal
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...TRANSLATED a wedding invitation in Dutch at the Taj Mahal's employment office while looking for a job in Atlantic City last week. The "Human Resources Manager" was grateful and impressed, but in the end, all she could offer me was a job as a bus greeter at $3.80 an hour...
...Rudyard Kipling, describing the original Taj Mahal...
When Donald Trump decided to acquire his own Taj Mahal, purity, holiness and unhappiness were certainly the last things on his mind. Trump's tastes run more toward grandiosity ("the eighth wonder of the world"), hyperbole ("totally unique") and wishful thinking ("the crowds are going to be so big, you won't be able to get into the place"). India's Taj Mahal took 22 years and more than 20,000 workmen to build. Trump's Atlantic City version took only eight years and 1,800 laborers. But Trump cedes nothing to the original structure. He claims to have built...
Approached from the boardwalk, the facade of the Taj Mahal actually looks edible, the work of a candymaker gone mad. The building sprawls along 17 beach-front acres, resembling a vast white meringue, iced with 70 fruit- flavored minarets and topped off with dribbles of gold. Peppermint lampposts line walkways that are guarded by nine stone elephants, among the very few decorative items on the property that are not fiberglass. The sculptors made sure the trunks swooped upward, an Indian sign for good luck. "We're striving for authenticity," explains architect Francis Xavier Dumont, 34, "where guests will feel like...
Whether it all succeeds, of course, depends on whether enough people agree with Trump, especially the high rollers and conventioneers whom Trump must separate from their money if his grandiose endeavor is to succeed. The whole point of the Taj Mahal to create enough ballrooms, exhibition space and hype to lure conventions away from places like Orlando, Las Vegas and New Orleans. But analysts give Trump's gamble long odds. To begin with, the weather in February is less than hospitable, and the Taj is hard to get to from most parts of the country. Traffic congeals on summer weekends...